Smith waved to him. Edwards rose quietly and walked over.
“I got Garcia on guard. I think we better go back to being Marines after all. If that’d been for real, we’d all be cold meat by now, Lieutenant.”
“We’re all too tired to move out just yet.”
“Yes, sir. The lady okay?”
“She’s had a tough time. When she wakes up-hell, I don’t know. I’m afraid she might just come apart on us.”
“Maybe.” Smith lit a cigarette. “She’s young. She might bounce back if we give her a chance.”
“Get her something to do?”
“Same as us, skipper. You’re better off doin’ than thinkin’.”
Edwards checked his watch. He’d actually gotten six hours of sleep before all this had happened. Though his legs were stiff, otherwise he felt better than he would have imagined. It was an illusion, he knew. He needed at least another four hours, and a good meal, before he’d be ready to move.
“We won’t move out until about eleven. I want everybody to get some more sleep and one decent meal before we head out of here.”
“Makes sense. When you gonna radio in?”
“I should have done that a long time ago, I just don’t want to climb those damned rocks.”
“Lieutenant, I’m just a dumbass grunt, but insteada doing that, why don’t you just walk downstream about half a mile? You oughta be able to track in on your satellite that way, right?”
Edwards turned to look north. Walking about that far would lower the angle to the satellite as well as climbing . . . why didn’t I think of that? Because like any good Air Force Academy graduate, you thought in terms of up-and-down instead of sideways. The lieutenant shook his head angrily, noting the sergeant’s sly grin before he lifted the radio pack and heading down the canyon’s rocky floor.
“You’re very late, Beagle,” Doghouse said at once. “Repeat your status.”
“Doghouse, things are just terrible. We had a run-in with a Russian patrol.” Edwards explained for another two minutes.
“Beagle, are you out of your Goddamned mind? Your orders are to avoid, repeat avoid, contact with the enemy. How do you know that somebody doesn’t know you’re there? Over!”
“They’re all dead. We rolled their vehicle over a cliff and set fire to it. We made it look like an accident, just like on TV. It’s all over, Doghouse. No sense worrying about it now. We are now ten klicks from where it happened. I’m resting my men for the rest of the day. We will continue our march north tonight. This may take longer than you expect. The terrain is rugged as hell, but we’ll do our best. Nothing more to report. We can’t see much from where we are.”
“Very well. Your orders are unchanged, and please don’t play white knight again-acknowledge.”
“Roger that. Out.” Edwards smiled to himself as he repacked the radio. When he got back to the others, he saw that Vigdis was stirring in her sleep. He lay down beside her, careful to stay a few feet away.
SCOTLAND
“Bloody cowboy-John Wayne rescuing the settlers from the bloody red Indians!”
“We weren’t there,” said the man with the eye patch. He fingered it briefly. “It is a mistake to judge a man from a thousand miles away. He was there, he saw what was happening. The next thing is, what does this tell us about Ivan’s troops?”
“The Sovs do not exactly have an exemplary record for dealing with civilians,” the first man pointed out.
“The Soviet airborne troops are known for their stern discipline,” the second replied. Formerly a major in the SAS, and invalided out, he was now a senior man with the Special Operations Executive, the SOE- “Conduct like this is not indicative of well-disciplined troops. That may be important later on. For the moment, as I told you earlier, this lad is turning out very nicely indeed.” He said it without a trace of smugness.
26 – Impressions
STENDAL, GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC
The flight in was bad enough. They’d come in aboard a light bomber, racing in at low level to a military airport east of Berlin, no more than four staff members to an aircraft. All had arrived safely, but Alekseyev wondered how much of it was skill and how much luck. This airfield had clearly been visited by NATO aircraft recently and the General already had his doubts about what his colleagues in the Air Force had told him about their ability to control the sky even in daylight. From Berlin a helicopter took his party to CINC-West’s forward command post outside Stendal. Alekseyev was the first senior officer to arrive at the underground bunker complex, and he did not like what he found. The staff officers present were too concerned with what the NATO forces were doing and not concerned enough with what the Red Army was supposed to be doing to them. The initiative had not been lost, but his first impression was that the danger was real. Alekseyev located the command operations officer and started assembling information on how the campaign was going. His commander arrived half an hour later, and immediately took Alekseyev into his office.
“Well, Pasha?”
“I have to see the front at once. We have three attacks under way. I need to see how they are going. The German counterattack at Hamburg was repulsed, again, but this time we lack the forces to exploit it. The northern area is currently in stalemate. Our deepest penetration to date is just over one hundred kilometers. The timetable has gone completely to hell, losses are far higher than expected-on both sides, but worse for us. We have gravely underestimated the lethality of NATO antitank weapons. Our artillery has been unable to suppress them enough for our forces to achieve a major breakthrough. NATO air power is hurting us badly, especially at night. Reinforcements are not getting forward as well as we expected. We still have the initiative in most areas, but unless we achieve a breakthrough, that may not last more than another few days. We must find a weakness in NATO lines and launch a major coordinated attack soon.”
“The NATO situation?”
Alekseyev shrugged. “Their forces are fully in the field. Further reinforcements are coming in from America, but from what our prisoners have told us, not so well as they expected. My impression is that they are stretched very thin in some areas, but we have not as yet identified a major area of weakness. If we can find one, and exploit it, I think we can rupture the front and stage a multidivisional breakout. They can’t be strong everywhere. The German demand for forward defense compels the NATO forces to try and stop us everywhere. We made the same mistake in 1941. It cost us heavily. It must be doing the same to them.”
“How soon do you wish to visit the front?”
“Within the hour. I’ll take Captain Sergetov with me-”
“The Party man’s son? If he’s hurt, Pasha . . .”
“He’s an officer in the Soviet Army, whatever his father might be. I need him.”
“Very well. Keep me posted on where you are. Send the operations people in. We have to get control of this whorehouse.”
Alekseyev commandeered a new Mi-24 attack helicopter for his reconnaissance. Overhead, a flight of agile MiG-21 fighters guarded the General as the helicopter skimmed low over the treetops. He eschewed the seat, instead crouching by the windows to see what he could. A lifetime of military service had not prepared him for the destruction that lay on the landscape below him. It seemed that every road held a burned-out tank or truck. The major crossroads had gotten particularly severe attention from NATO air power. Here a bridge had been knocked out, and immediately behind it a company of tanks waiting its repair had been savaged. The charred remains of aircraft, vehicles, and men had transformed the neat, picturesque German countryside into a junkyard of high-technology weapons. As they crossed the border into West Germany, things only got worse. Each road had been fought for, each tiny village. He counted eleven smashed tanks outside one such village, and wondered how many others had been pulled off the battlefield for repair. The town itself was almost totally destroyed by artillery and resulting fires. He saw only one building that looked like it might be habitable. Five kilometers west, the same story was repeated, and Alekseyev realized that a whole regiment of tanks had been lost in a ten-kilometer advance down a single road. He began to see NATO equipment, a German attack helicopter identifiable only from the tail rotor that stuck out from the circle of ashes, a few tanks and infantry carriers. For both sides the proud vehicles manufactured at the greatest expense and skill were scattered on the landscape like trash thrown from a car window. The Soviets had more to expend, the General knew, but how many more?